


Path to Gold

by JaneAustan (IvyLucius)



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Light Angst, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 16:31:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15666987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IvyLucius/pseuds/JaneAustan
Summary: Inspired by Mike Babcock's advice to our favorite Platonics. Just how DID this comeback work out?





	Path to Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Angst is my jam. Coming up on their 3rd anniversary is my headcanon. All apologies in the world for the glaring punctuation errors. Join me if you will on a journey and I promise I'll get KLawes outta here quick. ;-)

**Late August, 2015**

**Scott**

 

“You can have everything you want in life.”

This simple but profound statement had been echoing around in Scott’s head ever since Mike Babcock uttered it to him and Tess at dinner the night before. Mike Babcock, his mentor and idol, coach of his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs, had offered these simple words during the dinner discussion about their return to competitive ice. He and Tessa had just made a final decision to prepare for another Olympics and underneath the excitement they were also scared to death.  Mike’s confident wisdom was meant to center their thoughts around what they wanted and why they were doing this. Peeling themselves out of semi-retirement, thumbing their noses at the ISU, and risking themselves at center ice while the shadow of Sochi still lingered was no small thing.

He lay awake and staring at the ceiling of his hotel room, Kaitlyn asleep beside him. They had argued, again, after she had arrived from Ottawa earlier in the evening.

“Hey JC’s wedding invite came in the mail yesterday. I’m going to send it back, do you care what I order you for dinner?” she had casually mentioned as they were getting ready for bed.

“When’s that again, Kait?” he called from the bathroom through a mouthful of toothpaste.

“October 19th” she called back and he visibly winced into the bathroom mirror. He spit, rinsed, tossed his brush into the cup and then took a deep breath.

“Kait,” he said, coming around the corner into the room. She looked up, hearing the apology already in his voice.

“No, Scott, no what is it?” She’d moaned, dropping her book to the bed and meeting his gaze. Well, trying to meet his gaze while he scrubbed his hands over his face and moaned a little, too.

“I’m so sorry. That week just became the onboard week for b2ten.” As an Olympic athlete herself Kaitlyn understood the importance of them joining up with b2ten, the elite athletic prep organization based in Montreal. She had been almost as excited as he was to hear about their acceptance two days prior.

“Okay, but…” she hesitated a bit and he could hear the creeping confusion in her voice. “The wedding is on Saturday night. Won’t you be done with all that during the week?”

“No. It runs through Saturday with facilities tours in the morning, some media, and then a big fancy dinner that night with the whole team.” He realizes what she will say next before she says it.

“It’s just a dinner, then?”

“Technically, yes” his reply is hesitant and verging on annoyance as he hears the meaning in her voice. He tries to explain.

“But Kait I can’t drop out early…”

She cuts him off. “Scott you’ll be there all week and all the real stuff will be done, you can fly out after media and still make it.” CJ is a childhood friend. Scott has been hearing about this wedding for over a year now. He understands the scope of this disappointment.

“I can’t. I’m so, so sorry. I know this wedding is important. But this is a big deal for um, for me.” He almost says for us, catches himself. But it’s too late. She hears the um and understands.

Her eyes flash but she says nothing as she unfolds herself from the bed and starts to shove her feet into her sneakers.

“Kait, I only meant that I have to commit to the whole experience. You know how big this is. I can’t cut short the onboarding process, the very first experience we have with the whole team. These are people I need to spend huge chunks of my life with over the next two years. I feel terrible that it’s this exact same week.”

Still saying nothing, she brushes past him, shoving her arms into a hoodie as she reaches for the door handle. He puts a staying hand on her shoulder but she shrugs him off.

“I just need some air. I’ll be back.” Is all she says, voice icy.

Then she’s gone and he doesn’t go after her. Instead, he grabs a ten-dollar Molson out of the mini bar and slumps into one of the plush chairs facing the wall of windows. His chest is in knots as he takes a long pull from the bottle and frowns out at the Toronto skyline.

This is he and Kait’s third time being together and also their third argument since he and Tess had come home from a show in China a month ago announcing the comeback decision. That’s three more arguments than they had ever had in their entire year and a half long relationship prior, if he didn’t count whatever that night was in Scotland three months ago. And he didn’t want to examine that night too closely right now. So.

He takes another swig of beer and rubs a hand across his chest where the knot hasn’t eased in the slightest. He digs into his pocket for his phone and mindlessly pulls up Instagram. He doesn’t bother scrolling through his feed, he only really uses the app to see what Tess is telling the world that she’s up to. She hasn’t posted again since the photo of her beat up skates last night. Even though he’s seen it twice already the photo still makes the corner of his mouth quirk up into a half smile. Her skates are a disaster right now and they’re both a little nervous one or both skates are just going to disintegrate on the ice at any moment.

“Scott seriously” she’d murmured to him a month ago in Bejing as they sat across from one another in the venue’s locker room. “How could you let me get this far with these things?” She sat bent over her skates with a roll of white masking tape and scissors, hiding her smile.

He’d taken the bait.

“What?! Are you kidding – “ but her loud giggle cut him off and she waved the roll of tape in his direction.

“Got ya!” She teased him and laughed all over again as his face morphed from affront to fake snarl as he realized it. He owned a skate shop.

“I _own_ a skate shop, Tessa” he’d admonished her in a voice dripping with fake annoyance. “And my own partner over there with skates falling off her feet. Shameful. As you well know your next pair of skates was made 6 months ago, packed to ship and are sitting… _sitting_ on the outbound counter for the moment you say so, you insane woman. I will have them in Beijing tomorrow, just say the word.” he said, glancing at the crime scene of her boots. He’d ordered the new pair without even consulting her back before Stars on Ice Japan in January, when her skates had first started looking questionable.

 “T, those skates are fucking haunted. Please let me get you the new ones. Now.” He’d begged her at various points during the year. They were the same skates she’d had during Sochi. He had literally chucked his own Sochi skates into a river while muttering the Russian version of ‘Fuck You’ under his breath as soon as he had arrived home from the games.

“Thanks Scott, I really, truly appreciate it but I can’t break in a new pair right now. I just can’t. I’ll do it after Art on Ice, I promise. It’s so good to know they’re waiting for me anytime. And they’re not haunted!” insisted Little Miss Superstitious.

And so it had gone since last winter.

Without consciously meaning to, his thumb swipes up and he scrolls past the haunted skates and back through her account a little, stopping on the photo she had posted a few weeks ago. She’s all but naked in it, looking back over her shoulder and dripping with strands of pearls. The side of her right breast is peeking out from under her arm and she looks to him like an incredibly sexy angel.

When he had first seen it three weeks ago he was lying alone in bed, struggling through another insomniac night fueled by comeback worries and jetlag from Asia. His phone had sounded a night owl post from her and when he opened the photo he had audibly growled her name in the darkness, his voice low with a mix of surprise, jealousy, and lust, if he’s honest. (Except a guy like him with a loving, beautiful, long term girlfriend doesn’t jealously lust after his best friend of seventeen years so just surprise really.)

She had never posted a photo quite that...bare before. He just kept staring at her naked back and curve of her breast like he had never seen a woman. She was so heartbreakingly beautiful. It was his job to have his hands all over her body but she still managed to take his breath away. He closed his eyes in an attempt to break the spell but the damn image was seared into his brain. He opened them again and gave in to the impulse to run his thumb across the screen. Across her back and then tracing down along her breast.

His cock had grown rock hard under the bedsheets and soft cotton pajama pants. The first stroke of his own hand brought another low growl, involuntary and harsh, from his throat. He felt a pang of guilt but it was momentary, replaced with the sharp and needy pleasure that came as he worked himself in his fist. He kicked the sheets away and pulled down the front of the pants. The cool air felt so good on his heated skin. His head was filled with her naked back. He imagined dragging his lips down from her neck and across creamy smooth skin, then turning her around to drag his mouth across the swell of that breast until he had her nipple suckled into his mouth. Unlike every other person looking at that photo, he could picture with painfully exquisite detail the perfect, dark pink of her nipples on the other side.  Just a half dozen or so strokes of his hand and then he was forced to drop the phone to the bed beside him. His hips were stuttering, his jaw clenched, warm cum spurting into his cupped palm and onto his lean stomach.

The sound of the hotel door opening again jolts him back to the present and he quickly clicks his phone dark. The knot in his chest has eased a bit but all at once a wave of shame and self-disgust floods him as he looks at her sad face. Kaitlyn, his girlfriend and an all-around great woman, has been walking around upset and disappointed by him for the past half an hour. Instead of coming up with solutions to their scheduling problem or at least devising a romantic hail mary plan to make things up to her, he’s been fucking scrolling Tessa’s social media and staring at her naked back…again.

“Kait” he starts, his voice gentle and warm. He only hates himself more as he hears that. He knows the warmth is driven by guilt, not by a genuine desire to give her everything that she deserves.

She holds up a hand, glancing at him but not really looking.

“I’m tired Scott, it’s so late. Can we just go to sleep and discuss this in the morning?” her voice is soft, the tone distant.

“Sure, of course.” Relief floods his body but he keeps that out of his voice.

She climbs into bed and he goes into the bathroom to dump the unfinished half of his beer down the drain and brush his teeth for the second time. He’s not normally so fastidious about his teeth but he’s avoiding how awkward it’s going to feel to lay down beside her.

Coming out of the bathroom he sees her huddled under the covers, turned away from him and her light already turned out. He slides into the bed and, wracked with a fresh wave of guilt, skims a quick kiss to her shoulder. She doesn’t turn around.

He lays there beside her in the dark and tries to sort through the mess in his head. Tessa’s photos, Kait’s disappointment, the confusion and exhilaration of the past month, the crazy journey of the last year and a half since Sochi. Mike’s words at dinner punch through the chaos. “You can have everything that you want.”

It suddenly occurs to him that there is a key piece to this advice that involves discernment. He can have everything that _he wants_. But he can’t have everything.

He doesn’t want to spend the next two and a half years disappointing Kait like he just had.  The kind of comeback he and Tess are planning is not a flexible one. It’s not an inclusive one. Between the teams at Gadbois and b2ten and Tessa and his own driven nature, he absolutely will disappoint her. He doesn’t want to spend the next two and a half years having to worry about anything but training and Tessa.

And Tessa.

Finally, finally he lets the memory surface. When Mike Babcock had looked him in the eye and bluntly stated “You can have everything that you want in this life” the first thing that had come to mind wasn’t winning the gold medal in Korea. The first thing that had flashed into his mind was...

Tessa.

 


End file.
